Tactical-Tech

Tactical-Tech: Tech-Notes

Breaking it down, Barney style!

Search and Highlight Excel

28 August 2016

Situation: Change of Command Inventory.

Problem: It's all hands on deck getting equipment on the Commander's hand receipt lined up, in the hall way or out in the motor pool, in LIN order followed by NSN order along with all of it's BII. This is done in large part to minimize the time it takes for the Commander conducting the inventory to flip through the many printed out pages of his property book and find the item being inventoried. To save a few hours of his time, we spend a few days doing this work to prepare.

Solution: Wouldn't it be nice if we could just have that hand receipt on digits, scan a bar code, automagically search the document and highlight it? Well now you can! Introducing the Search And Highlight Excel (SAHE) xlsm document!

Hyper-V Domain Controller Time Problem

23 October 2015

With computers, usually the simplest answers are the hardest to find. For example, for the past several months, my home's domain time has been off by a couple hours. The task of fixing it was put on the back burner because I didn't know the simple answer to it and when I finally got around to trying, I simply couldn't find the answer.

As with most things in a computer, it came down to a stupid checkbox being checked.

Problem: A Hyper-V Domain Controller had the wrong time and kept resyncing to the wrong time

AIMS Beta 2 Finally Released!

24 June 2013

It's been a couple months since my last major post of anything, but I have a good ~~excuse~~ reason. I spent a good month or so studying and achieving the CISSP and the rest of the time working on the latest release of AIMS. Seriously took me about 2 weeks to figure out why lateral transfers and turn ins were taking so long to process (ended up being a primary key issue that took about 5 seconds to correct; figures).

So, yes, there are some minor schema changes to the database. And using the new frontend with the old backend won't work. But don't worry, there is a script that will upgrade the old Beta 1 database to the new Beta 2 without loosing any of the old information for both the Standalone and Enterprise editions.

Adobe Forms: Distributing forms and Consolidating the Responses

09 February 2013

A little while ago, I was tasked to create a class T shirt for a class that I am in. We (as a class) didn't have much established in way of espirt de corps, so sort of had to make something up. Now I didn't want to be the sole arbiter on the design, so I came up with a couple basic designs and ideas and wanted to let the class choose out of them and have their own input.

The way I decided the best way to get their input was by using Adobe Professional to create a survey form with the various options for a T Shirt and use Range/Approval voting to figure out which design was the one we would go with. Because I was using Range/approval voting, I needed to import the responses into Excel to average the votes. Long story. In any case, I didn't want to go through each response and put the responses into a spreadsheet manually, and I was in luck because Adobe Professional could do all that work for me. Check out the video to see how.

Click here for the basics of using Adobe Livecycle to create a form

GSLaPS- Generic Site Logon Powershell Script

08 February 2013

Once upon a time I created a logon script that allowed the user to choose the building and the office within that building, and based on the selection, it would map network drives, map printers, copy files, update registry settings, set favorites and homepages to a value specified for the office. The logon script wasn't actually a single logon script; it was actually about 15 different files. Some of them were HTA (which gave the user a drop down with their choices) others were VBS (which filtered who it would run for and actually executed the mappings). The problem was with all this is if something changed, it would usually require an update of 3 or 4 files and it wasn't an easy maintainance task to be passed down to just any random nugg.

Well, about a week ago I dove head first into powershell and decided that I could remake my HTA based script through powershell. And I could do it in only 2 (or 3) easy to manage files. I call it GSLaPS, or the Generic Site Logon Powershell Script. I don't know what the 'a' stands for, make something up.